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According to semipopular lore, the philosopher Socrates scored his biggest points as a teacher by playing dumb and asking a lot of good questions. This Socratic brand of strategic simplicity has been deployed to great effect in recent cinema, with a number of movies--Clueless, Election, Romy and Michele's High School Reunion--using the trappings of the fluffy teen flick to explore themes far beyond the reach of the typical Freddie Prinze Jr. film.
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"I wanted to make a movie that was grounded with the iconography of a mainstream teen movie, yet incorporated concepts and ideas you would never see in those kinds of movies," says Brian Dannelly, whose Saved! is the latest great example of the Socratic comedy. Directed by Dannelly (who cowrote the script with Michael Urban), Saved! is set in the standard world of the high-school film, where post-adolescents vie for power and popularity and all roads lead to prom. But Saved! achieves singularity thanks to a stiff dose of God, which kicks this teen comedy's themes and conflicts into uncharted territory.
"I've been born-again my whole life," says narrator and heroine Mary (Jena Malone), one of the best of the good girls at American Eagle Christian High School, where Mary is beginning her senior year at the top of the social food chain. By her side is Hilary Faye (Mandy Moore), Mary's best friend and American Eagle's Christian queen bee, and Dean (Chad Faust), Mary's boyfriend, who sets the film on its ambitiously twisty path by confessing to Mary his budding homosexuality. Determined to help Dean avoid the flames of Hell, Mary does what she believes is God's will. Mary gets pregnant, Dean gets shipped off for "degayification," and Saved! becomes the first teen flick in history to wrangle with some of the deepest issues known to man.
For the first hour or so, Dannelly succeeds wonderfully in spiking his straightforward teen comedy with sharp satiric bits, thanks in large part to a uniformly intelligent cast. As Mary, Jena Malone is the perfect Christian ingénue, displaying a fierce passion for truth that fuels both her faith and her heresy. This trait is alternately mirrored and questioned by her mother, played by Mary-Louise Parker (not only is Saved! smart enough to cast actual teens as teens, the parent-child pairings are refreshingly believable, with Martin Donovan and Patrick Fugit playing well-matched father-and-son love interests of Parker and Malone). But the biggest surprise is Mandy Moore, whose well-known personal beliefs give Saved! an implicit stamp of Christian approval while her ego-free performance as the manically faithful Hilary Faye earns the film's biggest laughs. (If there's a more succinct cinematic rendering of Christian hypocrisy than Moore screeching, "I am FILLED with Christ's love!" while hucking a Bible at her rival's back, I haven't seen it.)
Unfortunately, as Saved! winds down to its conclusion, all satire is abandoned for a relatively simplistic learning-and-growing wrap-up that feels far too familiar for such an otherwise groundbreaking film. Other elements get conveniently short shrift: Not only is Dean's battle with homosexuality swept off screen, Mary's scandalous pregnancy is successfully hidden from all but a few characters. Still, this film knows exactly what it is--a teen flick with a humanist agenda--and Dannelly picks his battles to suit his aims. Even with its too-pat ending (complete with syrupy underscoring--a duet of Brian Wilson's "God Only Knows" sung by Mandy Moore and Michael Stipe, one of the film's producers), Saved! closes with a tableau that will leave unreformed fundamentalists gaping in horror. Score one for the good guys.
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